Jared Bernstein

Jared Bernstein

Jared Bernstein (born 1955) is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He is currently serving as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors to President Joe Biden. From 2009 to 2011, he previously served as Chief Economist and Economic Adviser to Biden when he was Vice President in the Obama Administration.

Quotes

• Politicians use research findings the way a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not for illumination.
  • as cited in Jeff Madrick, Seven Bad Ideas (2014), p. 200

• Again, some of this stuff gets – some of the language and concepts are just confusing. The government definitely prints money, and it definitely lends that money by selling bonds. Is that what they do? They sell bonds, yeah, they sell bonds. Right? Since they sell bonds, and people buy the bonds, and lend them the money. A lot of times, at least to my ear with MMT, the language and the concepts can be kind of unnecessarily confusing but there is no question that the government prints money and then it uses that money to um, uh … I guess I'm just, I can't really, I don't get it, I don't know what they're talking about. . . . It's like, the government clearly prints money, it does it all the time, and it clearly borrows, otherwise you wouldn't be having this debt and deficit conversation. So I don't think there's anything confusing there.
  • When asked why the government borrows if it can print money. Documentary "Finding the Money" (2023).